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ZRAM Might Finally Be Moved Out Of Linux Staging

08-14-2013, 01:40 PM

Phoronix: ZRAM Might Finally Be Moved Out Of Linux Staging

The zRAM Linux kernel module that aims to increase Linux's performance by avoiding paging to disk and optimizing to use a compressed block device in RAM, may finally leave the Linux kernel staging area and be promoted to main. This code that mostly benefits users with limited amounts of system RAM has become quite mature and is becoming widely adopted, which in part is why it's trying to be promoted out of the staging area...

Comment

ZRAM has worked very well for me for swap. I tried turning it off on a machine a few days ago in order to switch to the newer frontswap/cleancache/zcache with a recent 3.10 kernel. Unfortunately, the machine started using up memory like crazy in the middle of the night while a VM was doing a full disk backup, and I started getting the OOM killer kicking in after 14GB of swap filled up. I read there are still some issues with frontswap/cleancache/zcache and tmem getting reclaimed and went back to ZRAM. ZRAM seems very stable and has the added benefit of compressed swap pages.

Comment

This is really interesting to me, because a combination of zRAM, the removal of X.org, and the sudden drop in the necessity of using proprietary or legacy drivers.. should mean that the RAM requirements of lightweight operating systems are about to drop quite suddenly. If you have a machine with 512MB, let's say you have to use 128MB as-is.. you then have 384MB for zRAM.. the Gentoo wiki says a 3:1 ratio is typical.. and suddenly you've got a twelve year old machine with what's effectively 1.25 GiB of RAM, 1GB of which should be free for use by applications.. that's amazing o.O When you add in the fact that you could swap some of these compressed pages to disk and use it to save on disk bandwidth... it really just redefines what's obsolete and what's not.

Comment

This is really interesting to me, because a combination of zRAM, the removal of X.org, and the sudden drop in the necessity of using proprietary or legacy drivers.. should mean that the RAM requirements of lightweight operating systems are about to drop quite suddenly. If you have a machine with 512MB, let's say you have to use 128MB as-is.. you then have 384MB for zRAM.. the Gentoo wiki says a 3:1 ratio is typical.. and suddenly you've got a twelve year old machine with what's effectively 1.25 GiB of RAM, 1GB of which should be free for use by applications.. that's amazing o.O When you add in the fact that you could swap some of these compressed pages to disk and use it to save on disk bandwidth... it really just redefines what's obsolete and what's not.